FairFUTURE
Fostering Adaptation and Inclusion for Resilient FUTURE: Fair Understanding, Transformation, Urban Resilience and Equity, known as the FairFuture Project, is a four-year fully funded Horizon Europe project advancing climate adaptation that actively centers social justice and ensures communities already most exposed to heat, drought, and related impacts are the first to benefit, not the last. It is implemented under the flagship EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change.
Overall, the FairFuture project addresses the pressing need for climate adaptation, with a particular focus on vulnerable communities. The objective is to develop and test inclusive adaptation measures that are tailored to local vulnerabilities, with a particular emphasis on just resilience in order to prevent an exacerbation of existing inequalities.
In collaboration with local and regional authorities (LRGs), national governments, and community-led initiatives, FairFuture will integrate climate risk assessments into local plans and policies. The project will operationalise Resilience Action Labs with the objective of co-developing equitable adaptation actions, measuring effectiveness, and promoting a broader understanding of just transformation in climate resilience. FairFuture aims to enhance local resilience, wellbeing and equity, providing a framework for inclusive decision-making and scalable adaptation strategies, and will:
Design and test adaptation measures with participating subnational governments — e.g. heat-mitigating public spaces, building-level protections, and governance reforms for at-risk areas
Write those measures into policy and plans, embedding protections in how regions actually operate
Run Resilience Action Labs to co-develop actions with local partners, track whether they reduce harm, and refine based on evidence
Build a pathway to scale, so solutions that work can be repeated elsewhere without starting from zero